James Carville's metaphors

I've been collecting and commenting on inept and absurd political metaphors over the past few weeks, but I thought of letting James Carville's recent comparison of Bill Richardson to Judas go by. I still don't understand its supposedly transparent logic. Judas : Jesus :: Bill Richardson : Bill Clinton? Hillary Clinton? Both?

I'm interested though in Carville's defense of his statement as metaphor. He defended it in these terms four times in his conversation yesterday with CNN: "It's a seasonal metaphor I was using"; "I was using a biblical metaphor"; "I wanted to use a very strong metaphor"; "It was a metaphor I was using." Carville never says that it was just a metaphor he was using, but his comments carry that suggestion, as if metaphor were simply a way to underscore one's meaning, and not a statement whose implications are its maker's responsibility. Just words after all, right? Just politics.

Another metaphor in Carville's remarks yesterday had me puzzled:

I mean, you do these things, and people come up and say, you’re comparing and everything else. I wanted — I got one in the wheelhouse and I tagged it.

As I just learned, wheelhouse is (among other things) a metaphor for "a hitter's power zone," and, it seems, one of Carville's pet words. No home run for James Carville this time — just a foul.

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"Modern-Day Proust"

Meet Eric Dressler:

Much like the prolific 19th-century French novelist Marcel Proust, local claims adjustor Eric Dressler generates prodigious volumes of prose, chronicling the most minute details of his life and experiences in a seemingly endless stream of e-mails, friend Kevin Honig reported Monday.

"Proust devoted the last decade of his life to writing In Search of Lost Time, a massive, sprawling, 3,000-page semiautobiographical work that covers 13 volumes," said Honig, Dressler's best friend since college. "Well, the way he spends half his work day sending e-mails, Eric has probably turned out at least that much. I get, like, six or seven a day without fail."

Modern-Day Proust E-Mails Friend Six Times A Day (The Onion)

All Proust posts (via Pinboard)

Strained political metaphors of the day

Carpetbagging beaver! Drunken horse! Tired as dogs! From Erica Jong:

We have two great candidates — one a hard working, never give up eager beaver, and one an inspiring, heart-leapingly brilliant stallion. . . .

They're tired. Dog-tired. The stallion makes heart-stopping speeches. And the beaver just beavers along, remembering how she won over upstate New York when everyone called that impossible. And called her a carpetbagger. And the stallion is drunk on his own rhetoric. . . .

We need beavers and we need stallions. Beavers get the work done. Stallions inspire us. And they both have limitations. Stallions have fragile legs (think Barbaro). And beavers are nothing without their teeth.

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Puzzling political metaphor of the day

Tristan und Isolde, Live in HD

The Metropolitan Opera's current production of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde has had problems, problems, problems, problems. But today's performance, which Elaine and I were fortunate to see as a Live in HD broadcast, was a triumph in all ways — musically, visually, and emotionally. Elaine has already found a detailed review. [Update: She's now written her own.]

The Met's Live in HD might be the most remarkable experience you'll ever have in a multiplex. The broadcasts are available in sixteen countries and one U.S. territory (Puerto Rico). For more information:

The Metropolitan Opera Live in HD

I wish that my friend Aldo Carrasco were here so that I could tell him that I've finally seen Tristan.

Jackie Gleason on creating a character

[Photograph of New York City subway rider by Walker Evans.]

He once told me that the creation of a character "starts with looking at all the people on the subway, figuring out how they might have got that way."

Audrey Meadows, Love, Alice: My Life as a Honeymooner (NY: Crown, 1994)

Spring break explosion

Ah, college life:

Three spring breakers were arrested after an explosion rocked two hotel guests from their bed and shattered the windows of their Daytona Beach Shores hotel room around 2:30 a.m. Friday. . . .

"They're really nice guys, they were just really drunk yesterday . . . We saw 'em before dark and they were so wasted that I don't think they remember doing that."

Spring Breakers Arrested After Dynamite Explodes On Hotel Sundeck (WFTV)

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Puzzling political metaphor of the day

From CNN, an overwritten behind-the-scenes account of Eliot Spitzer's resignation, with salivating journalists, thick air (thick with anticipation, natch), and a barking reporter. And then there's this sentence:

Spitzer had described himself as a political "steamroller." But in the end this proud politician had only crushed himself.

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Color and academia

A few years back, a faculty colleague, after expressing concern that his puppies would develop racist tendencies for lack of exposure to minorities, asked if he could bring the dogs to my house to play with my two sons, ages 1 and 3. My children — like their parents and unlike most everyone else at the college and in our town — are of the Negro persuasion.

That's the opening paragraph of Jerald Walker's witty, hopeful essay on color and academia:

Teaching, and Learning, Racial Sensitivity (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Overheard

In a hallway:

"It starts and ends in a mailbox. What can it symbolize?"

Literary criticism, I suspect.

All "Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

Borders Books and Music in trouble

From an article in tomorrow's New York Times:

Struggling against both online and big-box retailers, the Borders Group, the bookseller, said Thursday that it had hired two investment banks to advise it on a potential sale and had turned to its largest shareholder for additional money.

Borders said that it would take other measures to shore up its capital, including suspending its quarterly dividend.

The announcement, made at 1:31 a.m. Thursday and accompanying a report on a slight drop in first-quarter earnings, reflected the chain’s continued troubles. Buffeted by a tougher environment and a tighter credit market that has made borrowing more expensive, Borders has been left with few options.

"This will be a challenging year for retailers due to continued uncertainty in the economic environment," Borders's chief executive, George L. Jones, said in a statement.

I've been wondering about Borders for several months now — the coupons seem to come with greater and greater frequency, while the shelves at my nearby branch offer fewer and fewer new books and the CD racks grow bare.